Description Although this work has been overshadowed in the history of philosophy by Descartes’s more famous Meditations, it contains his most mature and influential discussion of mental states (specifically emotions) as the object of scientific […]
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An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Description The Essay marks an important moment in the prehistory of empirical psychology. Locke seeks to explain how we come to have certain mental states (“ideas”) while doggedly avoiding metaphysical speculation of the sort found […]
Christian Wolff’s Prolegomena to Empirical and Rational Psychology: Translation and Commentary
Description In this translation of a short selection of Wolff’s extremely influential Psychologia empirica (published in 1732, with a second edition released in 1738), he sets out some of his key assumptions regarding how to […]
Critique of the Faculty of Judgment [Urteilskraft]
Description Received most often as Kant’s aesthetic treatise, but also understood as his mature political treatise (cf., Hannah Arendt’s “ectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy). Unlike most aesthetic treatises before and since, this one privileges natural […]
On the Aesthetic Education of Man
Description Deserves as much credit as any source for bringing the political implications of Kant’s Critique of Judgment into contemporary discourse. Despondent over the perceived failure of the French Revolution, Schiller asks, “Why are we […]
Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy
Description Argues that Kant’s Critique of Judgment represents his mature political philosophy. Judgment is important for Arendt as the faculty which mediates between particularity and universality, thereby providing the conditions for a uniquely human interpolation […]
“Aesthetics and Civil Society: Theories of Art and Society, 1640–1790”
Description Shows how Kant wrote his Critique of Judgment as a synthesis of English theories of “taste” and civil society and German theories of “aesthetic.” Writers since Hobbes have used theories of art to advance […]
“Art and Democracy”
Description Interprets an “increasingly visible weariness and distrust towards democracy” and proposes the construction of contemporary “Academies of Art” to aid in the education of “mature” citizens. Lachenmann interpolates his remarks into two discourses. First, […]
Emile, or on Education
Description Outlines a program for educating children according to the precepts of Nature. Heavily influenced by Locke’s philosophy of human understanding, this 1762 treatise argues that parents should pursue a “negative education”: avoid formal schooling […]
The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment
Description Explores Enlightenment optimism about the perfectibility of mankind by looking at efforts to educate and “civilize” children. Chapters consider reactions to so-called “wild children”; utopian pedagogical schemes (including efforts to apply Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, […]